Returning To Normal

What is normal? My friend says that normal is a cycle on a dryer. I tend to agree with that philosophy.

How about returning to less hectic? Or perhaps less exciting?

My friend, Hopper, recently left to begin his final round of training before he is deployed to Iraq. He’ll spend another couple of months in U.S. before they ship him off to Kuwait for his final round of training. But, for all intents and purposes he is gone for about 15 months.

Now, you have to understand that I love Hopper. I truly do. But he can be a whirlwind and difficult to bear from time to time. He lived with me off and on over the last year as he enlisted in the National Guard. He’d go off for training and come back. No job, not Hopper. I’m not sure he could work a normal job. So lots of free time.

And he’s crazy. So you have these drunken all night long parties until all hours of the morning with who knows what. Giraffe’s in the backyard peeking through the window with crazy midget strippers running around? Not that unusual.

Jager Bombs until 3:00am while Hopper gets wasted and flip flops between being angry, sad, or extraordinarily happy? Not unusual….and not just on weekends. This was a nightly occurrence sometimes.

Hey! I don’t blame the guy. He was getting ready to deploy. Might as well party and get laid as much as possible because you are now cut off.

But it could be hard, like I said. Hopper is hard on things. He’s hard on himself. He’s hard on stuff. And he’s hard on other people. He doesn’t mean to be, it’s just the way he is. He is so over the top with everything he does in his life that it’s either going to rub you the wrong way or it won’t.

And that’s OK when you don’t live with that person, but man….it gets tiring. Imagine having a completely out-of-control 35 year old kid and you kind of get the idea.

I’m a bit of a clean freak – he isn’t. I’m very meticulous with taking care of things – he isn’t. I tend to be reserved and have moments of being completely wild and crazy – he has moments of being reserved. That’s not to say that we are entirely opposites, but my point is that it can be difficult to live with someone whose values are so drastically different.

And I was just recently gone for six weeks. So now I am playing catch-up on a lot of stuff (bills, house work, etc) and am trying to get used to that as well as unwinding from his last week here.

So will my life be a little more uninteresting? Perhaps, but that isn’t necessarily a bad thing. And, no offense to anyone, but I doubt what I consider normal is close to what most people consider normal. Where was that giraffe again?